Ookla’s Speedtest is probably one of the most popular ones out there when you want to benchmark your internet speeds on your home network or your mobile data. But lately, what’s become more important to a lot of people is testing their bandwidth for video streaming. A few months ago, Speedtest introduced Video Testing on their app and now finally it’s available for Android devices. What it does is basically measure the quality of streaming experience you’ll get from your network and give you recommendations on how you can optimize it.
The video test can now be seen on the Speedtest Android app and it works in a simple but useful manner. It will play a short video using adaptive bitrate streaming on your device. Then it will play several short videos at increasing video resolutions until it fails to complete in a “reasonable amount of time” or until it finishes at a resolution of 4K. The purpose of this is to assess the maximum video capability that your network is able to give you. Sometimes though, it can exceed your device’s capabilities for video streaming quality.
The test will give you information like maximum resolution, load time, buffering percentage, and suggested devices to stream video at the maximum performance level. These are all actionable information by the way and Ookla even gives some things you can do with it. Aside from finding out whether your network is giving you what you expect, you can see recommendations as to which devices will work best for streaming videos on your network.
When the test says your video streaming quality meets or exceeds the resolution supported but you still can’t stream videos, you can check for potential outages of the streaming service you’re trying to use. Ookla also has another tool for that called Downdetector. And if you’re the kind of person who likes to look at statistics, you can compare historical streaming experiences with the current network performance.
The video test can be found on the Speedtest Android app. It’s located on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen. The test should give you actionable results and recommendations in about a minute.